Part 4 (2/2)
She shrugged away sharply. ”The virus no more mutated me into a half cat than it mutates a heron-linked guide into a bird, or a tealer-linked guide to a fish. The virus just changes the brain chemistry so I'm sensitive to biofields. That's all.”
Wren raised his eyebrows against the rain. ”Heard you started camping out on the Sinking Plains when you worked that route with Kurvan last year.”
”I was tending to a wounded tarn,” she retorted. ”Its head k.n.o.b was cracked, and it couldn't hunt till it regained its equilibrium.”
”Right,” he said mock seriously. ”The Landing Pact. I forgot. Protect the species and all-”
”I did full-spectrum scans and bacterial breakdowns the entire time I was there,” she protested coldly. ”The sensor poles in that area had not gotten in two years a tenth of what I brought back in a month-” She broke off at Wren's expression. ”All right,” she acknowledged. ”The tarn wasn't hurt that badly, and I didn't need to help the species. I just didn't like Kurvan.”
His gray eyes glinted. ”Just as well you're going out to Broken Tree. You're like a cat in a cage when he's around.”
”I'm better on the scans anyway. I wouldn't know a biochip if it bit me.” She watched the second s.h.i.+p drop lower. ”You'll be off-contract in a month?”
”It's scheduled, but you never know. s.h.i.+ppers never set a date for transporting biochips-security reasons.”
”There have got to be some buyers chomping at the bit to get their hands on that load.”
”Buyers including guilders,” he said, with a glance toward the sh.o.r.e.
Tsia laughed shortly. ”Guilders want everything. I'd rather work for a freepick.”
Wren shrugged. ”You're guild yourself, Feather. You belong with the meres, but you take contract as it comes, whether you work for the miners or the freepicks. Look at Striker. She hates the lifers, but she signed her ID on the node. That freepick at the Hollows who's descended from one of the lifer gang leaders-Striker will have to defend that woman as if she were the head of the meres. Like you'll have to -” ”-defend the guild guide at Broken Tree,” she finished for him.
”At least you once liked that guild.”
Tsia's lips pressed together. She looked away from him, and her nose wrinkled at the sweet-bitter scent of the sea. She knew this smell as a baker knew bread. She fingered the scars across her cheek, ignoring the rain that washed the whitened skin. The guides had been more willing to admit her death than verify the untruth of it in the node; she owed them nothing now. No moral stance would convince her of an obligation other than the one she signed. The meres were the ones to whom she owed allegiance now. Ten years she had worked for the guild of fighters-seen for them, scanned for them, hid them in the terrain they crossed. A decade now they'd carried her link ID. It wasn't as if she held some kind of temporary job. The guides-they were no longer her life; the meres had become her future.
The heat of Wren's hand on her shoulder was a shock to her rain-chilled skin. When she reached up to touch his thick fingers, their eyes met: one cold, gray gaze; one dark blue. They stood for a moment till Wren dropped his hand. Tsia turned back to the sea.
Waves swept by, their foam streaking the sea. The platform shuddered with their rhythm. Around it, the jellies methodically rose and tore the underside of the floating rafts, dragging their spoils down. Down, lower, to bury the seedpods where they would feed the jellies' offspring. Caught in the rubbery, feathery bodies, the dim light of dawn faded to a gray-black gloom long before it reached the dark and rocky bottom of the sea. Tsia let her biogate expand so that she could feel far below the sea's surface. She turned slowly in a circle so that she could use her eyes like her gate to sense movement. But there was no threat in the jellies or the platform sponges, no sense of a predator that waited for the meres. Other than the storm and the growing sonic hum of the descending skimmer, there were no sounds from the ocean but the sea itself.
Beside her, Wren's presence was a constant shadow in her senses. His body, thickened with the age of 148 years, had a heavy feel. His short stature, his wide, wiry shoulders, and his long, lean arms gave him the look of a wrestler who had gone too long without food. His clublike hands were brutally built and far too big for his frame. His whole body radiated a cold power that gave his biofield a menace she could almost taste.
Her eyes drifted toward a growing shadow on the crest of a far swell. A moment later, the front end of a weedis bent over the moving hill of water and slid down the other side. The mental hum of the four sarga.s.so cats-the sea cougars- crouched on the raft was sharp, and Tsia licked her lips. Louder and sharper, the sense of them grew till it clogged her mind with its low-hum growling. It was her only real talent, she thought without emotion-this sensitivity to the cats. Her biology degrees were worth nothing without the gate-without the one thing for which the mere guild kept her safe. The rights-conditioning that let her use a weapon-they could have trained her for that, though it would not have been pleasant or easy. Guides did not take well to rights-conditioning unless they were trained before they took the
guide virus.
Wren peered at the sky from beneath his hands, watching the s.h.i.+p drop out of a streak of gray. He gestured toward one of the huts. Tsia shook her head. ”I like the wind,” she shouted. ”It tastes like freedom.”
His lips stretched in a slow smile, and in the murky light of midmorning, the expression somehow flattened his eyes even further. ”Freedom? Yes, you would call it that.”
”But not you?”
”No.” The thick scar rings of white on his wrists stood out starkly in the gloom. ” 'Freedom' is a word that's often confused with 'hope.' ”
”And that's something you don't have.”
”No. Do you?”
She studied him silently while the wind lashed the color from their cheeks and the rain beat the deck
around them.
He eyed her back. ”Look at yourself closely, Feather. You're not one who's made of hope either, but rather will-or determination. You delude yourself if you think otherwise.”
”Everyone has some kind of hope,” she returned slowly. ”They may not know it, but they do.”
”Everyone? What about your sister? She's got no hope at all.”
”That's different,” she said quietly. ”Her hope was stolen from her like credit from the node-blind.”
”I don't believe that.” He shrugged at her expression. ”No one can take anything from you that you don't
willingly give. You make choices, not sacrifices. You take action or you decide to remain still. Only
victims blame others for their lives.”
His gesture took in her braced stance and the gusting wind that whipped her. ”You are what you make of yourself. Nothing less. Nothing more.”
She licked the spray from her lips and smiled in a twisted expression. ”I said that myself a long time ago. It's odd to hear my words on someone else's lips.” She watched the spray puddle like tide pools in the mucus on the decks. ”Ten years ago, I gave up everything, and I gave up nothing. And look where I am now: in a day that is night, in a sea that is solid”-she stomped her foot on the spongy marine deck-”in a life that does not really exist.”
Wren watched the skimmer begin its long sweep to come around. ”The mere guild isn't perfect,” he said. ”But it does protect its members to Vendetta, to death, and beyond. And the freepicks-or any of the people we work for-would not exist without us. They would be crushed by the fanatics, just like the lifers crushed old Earth. The people you protect... You defend your world now as much as any guide protects her a.s.signed plot of land. You just do it on a different scale. With shorter contracts.”
With death instead of life. Tsia did not voice the words, but Wren gave her a sharp look. She wondered suddenly if he was esper. Or did he just know her so well that he could read her like a dreamer channel?
Wren rocked back with the force of the wind. Doggedly, he shoved his way off again. ”It's getting worse by the minute. Let's go in.”
She shook her head, her teeth bared to the sky. Wren raised his hand to take hold of her blunter, but her eyes glinted with challenge. He shrugged and stepped back.
She could feel the sea cougars from here-almost see them on the weedis. Flung up and down by the island's motion, the four shapes crouched in miserable huddles. As with the mind-shadows of the fish, Tsia did not see the cats visually; she felt them. The rough ride made their discomfort acute, and it was harder now to ignore them than to acknowledge their misery in her own guts. Up, down, and back across the crests. Whipped down into a trough and flung back up again... Like a sick-ness in her belly, or a rottenness in her nose, her body reacted as if it rode the weedis with them. Her lips twisted at the yowling of the cubs.
Wren's eyes watched the second skimmer hover above the flight deck. Tsia felt for his biofield in her gate. The contrast between him and the cougars was unsettling. Where Wren was a solidity that she smelled and heard more with her bodily senses, the cougars growled in a thick hum that filled the corners of her mind like fog. Where Wren spoke only to her ears, the cats snarled constantly in her head. Humans were dull and acrid compared to cats. With distance, they did not even leave an echo in her mind. Yet she could feel the weight of the sandcats on the beaches ten kilometers away. Could almost touch the grit that clung to their paws and taste the water they drank.
Wren eyed Tsia, then the drop to the surface of the sea. ”So what's your range in all this now?” he asked over the wind.
”Human?” She shrugged. ”Fifty meters, if it's a focused biofield.”
”If it's quiet? Silent? Whatever you call it?”
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